Thesis Thursday: Elizabeth Lemmon

On the third Thursday of every month, we speak to a recent graduate about their thesis and their studies. This month’s guest is Dr Elizabeth Lemmon who has a PhD from the University of Stirling. If you would like to suggest a candidate for an upcoming Thesis Thursday, get in touch.

What long term care provision is available to older people in Scotland?

Long term care (LTC) in Scotland comprises both formal care and unpaid care. Formal care encompasses care provided by professionals in a person’s own home as well as care in a residential care setting. Unpaid care is care that is provided by family members, friends, or neighbours. Long term care is provided to older people who need help because they are ill, frail or have a disability. It might mean help with more administrative tasks such as filling in forms, paying bills, shopping, and housework, but can also mean help with things of a more personal nature such as washing and dressing. Since 2002, individuals living in Scotland aged 65 or over are entitled to free personal care (FPC) at home, subject to a needs assessment. This makes Scotland quite different to England, where personal care costs are borne by the service user and their families, and provides a unique opportunity to conduct research.

What were the pros and cons of your chosen data sources?

I used three data sources in my PhD. Those included the Family Resources Survey (FRS), the Scottish Government’s administrative Social Care Survey (SCS) and publically available data zone level data. The key benefit of using survey data like the FRS was that they captured information about care recipients and their caregivers. I used these data in my third paper to look at unpaid carers’ Standard of Living (SoL). The down side of the FRS is that it only captures a subset of the population, which might be systematically different from the population at large. At the same time, although there is information on carers and the person they are caring for, this information is very limited for those who are not living with the care recipient. On the other hand, the benefit of using the SCS, which I used in my first two papers, is that it captures population level information about the provision of LTC services. However, unlike the FRS, the SCS was designed for administrative purposes meaning that it lacks the richness of information on client circumstances and characteristics. One solution to this is to use data zone level information as a proxy for those characteristics, but often this is not enough. Overall, the PhD highlighted both the strengths and weaknesses of working with these different data sources, pointing to the potential of using linked administrative and survey data in future research.

How did you identify sources of inequity in the provision of long term care?

Inequity in the provision of LTC exists if there are differences in LTC provision after accounting for differences in need. I investigated this issue of inequity in my first paper. In particular, we observed from the raw data that there are big differences in FPC provision between the 32 Scottish local authorities. As I mentioned, FPC is available to anyone in Scotland aged 65+ who needs it. Perhaps those differences are due to differences in need. But I didn’t find that this was the case. It seemed that, even after accounting for the need of local authority populations, via the proportion of disability benefit claims, there were still large differences in provision of FPC. I modelled this inequity using a simple regression framework. The results from the regressions found that there is evidence of geographic inequity in the provision of FPC in Scotland. In particular, the analysis suggests that the differences between the FPC rate and the rate of disability are not consistent across local authorities, suggesting that a needy individual might be more or less likely to receive care depending on where they live. One explanation for this is that local authorities differ in terms of their practices for managing the demand for FPC. However, this is an area that would require more detailed investigation with individual local authorities to understand their practices.

What is the role of unpaid care, and how did you model that?

Unpaid care is defined as care that is provided by family members, partners, or friends to those who require help because they are ill, frail, or have a disability. The care that they provide is unpaid and often considered as having a zero cost in economic evaluations. This might lead to inefficient resource allocation and poor policy decisions. In my second paper, I tried to model the effect that unpaid carers have on the FPC use of the cared for. This was difficult due to the potential reverse causality that occurs between the two. I compared different models to try to estimate this effect. Overall, my findings suggest that unpaid carers likely complement FPC services in Scotland. This relationship might be due to unpaid carers advocating on behalf of the cared for, and demanding services from the local authority for them. They might do this because they require more support to enable them to remain in the labour force. It could also be that the type of care unpaid carers provide is different to that provided by formal carers.

Why did you use a ‘standard of living’ approach and what can it tell us about the cost of unpaid care?

The motivation for using the SoL approach, as implemented by Morciano et al (2015), was really that we felt it might capture more of the trade-offs that are involved in providing care. Specifically, it is expected that unpaid carers have to divert resources in order to pay for goods and services for the person they are caring for. Compared to the conventional costing methods which have focused on attaching a monetary value to the time a carer gives up in order to provide care, we argue that the SoL approach may capture a wider array of the trade-offs that are involved in providing unpaid care. For example, are unpaid carers less able to afford to go on holiday or to take part in a regular leisure activity? If it is the case that unpaid carers have to invest resources into providing care then they might have fewer resources to devote to their own needs and wants, resulting in unpaid carers having a lower SoL compared to non-carers. The results suggest that unpaid carers who are living with the person they are caring for would require compensation of £229 per week in order for them to reach the same SoL as a non-carer.

What are the key steps necessary to identify and address unmet need in this context?

My research highlighted that there is possibly unmet need for FPC in Scotland and that this could potentially be more likely for older people who don’t have an unpaid carer helping them to access FPC services. Understanding this unmet need is a key area which requires further research. Unfortunately, it is difficult to measure and we only ever observe the met need for care, i.e. those who end up receiving formal care services. Thus, prior to addressing unmet need, it is important that we can measure it. One step necessary in doing so would be to carry out detailed investigations with individual local authorities. This would help us understand more about the needs of those individuals who apply for FPC but who are turned down. But this is only part of the picture. Understanding where individuals need FPC but don’t apply, either due to transaction costs, a lack of information on how to access those services, or other reasons, is far more difficult. One approach to gaining insight on these individuals could be to conduct qualitative interviews with them and their families.